FRAMINGHAM -- On a recent chilly morning, Carlos Oliveira stood downtown
with a dozen of his fellow Brazilians waiting for work.

The day before, Oliveira, 50, spent three hours in front of the Brazilian
bakery across the street from the Memorial Building, hoping to land a job for
the day painting homes, cutting trees, or moving furniture.

He walked home empty-handed.

"When it's cold, there isn't much work," said Oliveira, who ran a small
business as a beekeeper in Brazil before he came here illegally to help
pay his 19-year-old daughter's college tuition.

"It's disappointing, but you know you cannot let feelings of sadness or
anguish take over you," he said. "It's very uncertain, but you keep
having hope."

Oliveira is among several dozen workers, mostly Brazilians, who gather
every morning in front of the bakery in an informal day laborer site, where
workers wait to be picked up by contractors or homeowners for landscaping,
construction and other low-paying jobs.

The scene is common across the country, where laborer sites have sprung up
in busy intersections and parking lots of coffee shops and home improvement
stores. A UCLA study published in January estimated that every day,
nearly 120,000 people, mostly illegal immigrants, are looking for or are
working day-laborer jobs in the United States.

As the sites multiply, they also draw complaints. In January, local
anti-illegal immigration opponents staged a protest in front of the Framingham
bakery. They have also filmed and photographed the workers and the
employers, mostly landscapers and painters, who hire them.

"We're just trying to show that everytime you do this, you're hurting
America. That's all. You're hurting America," Jim Rizoli
said. "And it sends a message to Washington that something has to be
done."

As the weather gets warmer, Rizoli and other members of his group, CCFIILE,
intend to hold more protests and make a renewed push to document the local
businesses that hire the workers.

On its Web site, www.ccfiile.org, the group lists more than 40 vehicles,
including license plates and business names in some cases, that it claims
were spotted in front of the bakery hiring workers. The list covers
several days in November.

"This is the reason illegal immigration occurs. Businesses hire them
and they're not supposed to hire them," said Harold Wolfe, who manages the
Web site and logs the businesses. "If businesses didn't hire illegal
immigrants, there wouldn't be any illegal immigrants."

For Oliveira, a father of two who came here a year ago, the protests don't
make sense.

"We do the work Americans don't want to do," he said taking refuge from the
cold inside the coffee shop, Padaria Brasil. "We're here because we
want to work."

Such conflicts between the workers and protesters have sprouted
nationwide. In Virginia last year, authorities arrested 24 people waiting
for work outside a 7-Eleven, according to the Washington Post. Officials
and residents there, the paper reported, complained the site was a disruption
and that workers left trash behind.

As for the businesses on CCFIILE's site, two of them contacted by The
Daily News insisted that they do not hire day workers and may only have been
at the bakery to get coffee.

Harry Wildman, president of Riverside Tree and Landscape in Ashland, said
his business hires between 15 and 20 immigrant workers every year through
the federally sponsored H-2B program, which allows immigrants to legally work
in the United States.

They are paid about $9 an hour, a rate set by the federal government,
and work here for 10 months at a time. None of them are picked up at
the Concord Street bakery, he said.

"We pride ourselves on doing it right," Wildman said.

Riverside has hired these workers for about four years. It advertises
the jobs here, so no Americans are blocked from getting jobs, but the
business has trouble finding qualified applicants. No one, Wildman
said, "wants to wash dishes, be a landscaper, (or) drive a taxi."

"We should not be on that (Web) site because we don't participate in what
that site's about," he said.

Rizoli insists Americans would take the jobs if businesses paid more, but
they don't have to thanks to a large illegal immigrant population willing
to work for low wages. A new study from the Pew Hispanic Center estimated
there are 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, accounting
for one in every 20 workers.

At the very least, Rizoli wants the work site moved behind the bakery,
away from downtown Framingham's main thoroughfare.

"Why do they have to be an eyesore to the town?" he asked. "Would
Wellesley permit them to be downtown? Would Weston permit them to
be downtown? Would Natick permit them to be downtown? C'mon.
It's an insult."

A business can legally hire day laborers but must make a "good faith effort"
to ensure that they are eligible to work in the United States, said Bill
Strassberger, a spokesman with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Service. Employers, he said, should ask for verifying documents, but
he cautioned that not all laborers are breaking the law.

"I think it's a dangerous assumption that a day laborer is illegal because
it's not always true," he said.

Oliveira, the Brazilian day worker, said that more often than not, employers
and others who come to hire them don't ask for documents and when they do,
they don't check them. The laborers are paid in cash, between $8
and $12 an hour depending on the work.

Sometimes, he said, employers pay them less than what they promised, and
other times they don't pay them at all.

The UCLA study "On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States" found that
nearly half of all laborers were never paid for work in the two months prior
to being surveyed. They also reported they had been denied food,
water and breaks while on the job.

A 40-year-old Brazilian worker who was waiting for work last week outside
the bakery said even Brazilian employers sometimes cheat them.

"They do it with us because they couldn't do that to Americans," said the
man, who declined to give his name.

Many of the Brazilian day laborers said they came here escaping a dearth
of opportunities in Brazil, where the minimum wage is $100 a month.
For Emerson Miranda, 25, father of a 5-year-old girl, coming here was like
winning the lottery.

He said his family depends on him. Thanks to his work as a laborer,
he sends home $500 a month, $300 of which goes to pay his brother's
college tuition, and the rest is divided among his parents, daughter and
wife. When winter hits and work gets scarce, Miranda uses his savings
to get by and scrambles to find work.

"My brother has to pay the tuition and my family has to eat," Miranda
said. "But even when there isn't much work, I still make more
money here than down there."

For now, Miranda and Oliveira look forward to the end of winter when more
jobs are available. On that cold morning around 10 a.m., for the
second day in a row, Oliveira didn't get chosen for work, but he said he
would be back the next day.